Supreme Court seeks ECI reply on plea for SOP to verify EVM data

The Supreme Court on Tuesday sought Election Commission of India (ECI)'s response on a petition seeking a Standard Operating Procedure for compliance with the top court's 2024 directions for verification of the Electronic Voting Machine (EVM) data. .The Court last year had allowed candidates who come 2nd or 3rd in the election results, to request for verification of the burnt memory/microcontroller in five percent of the EVMs per assembly constituency or an assembly segment of a parliamentary constituency by engineers of the manufacturers.Pertinently, the Bench of Chief Justice of India (CJI) Sanjiv Khanna and Justice Dipankar Datta said on Tuesday that the process should not lead to deletion of the original poll data."We will keep this after 15 days. Please file your response by then. Please do not erase the data and reload the data. Let someone just examine," the Court told the ECI..The order was passed on a petition moved by Association of Democratic Reforms (ADR) which was represented by advocate Prashant Bhushan. A petition moved by Haryana Congress candidate Sarv Mitter was also listed.Senior Advocate Devadutt Kamat, who represented Mitter, told the Court that such verification was being allowed only on dummy units. He further highlighted even then, it costs ₹40,000 per machine to the candidate."I appear for Sarv Mitter. The entire data was wiped out. the EVMs on which polling was done should be tested," he said.The Court expressed a surprise at the cost and wiping of original data."This will destroy the data.. you have to file a reply ECI.. file a reply on the cost of 40,000 per machine for such a poll..what we intended was that after the poll of someone has to pay ... let them pay but what we wanted to ensure that engineer should see if tampering is done or not. Why do you remove the data?," CJI Khanna remarked.The Court said it would reduce the cost for verification of data. Seeking ECI's response, the Court listed the matter for hearing on March 17.